There was a big international conference in London recently. I know this because when I went out for a ride on my bicycle, I twice had to swerve out of the way of a huge black Mercedes S-class with diplomatic plates as it hurtled towards me without even trying to stop. I called the president of Malawi a name he certainly wouldn’t hear at the Court of St James’s as he shot across my path.

However, it is not just because I was nearly killed that I think that it is profoundly wrong how politicians who exert such a phenomenal amount of power over the lives of ordinary, normal people insist on travelling in a way that so completely insulates them from those same ordinary people. If you are wafted about in the biggest limousines, your path cleared of the insignificant herd by motorcycle outriders, then you are rapidly going to lose all contact with reality.

What I propose is that once these big conferences finish there shouldn’t be a line of S-classes, Jaguars or BMWs waiting, but instead there should be a phone like they have at the supermarket connected to the number of a minicab firm that the president or ambassador could ring when they were ready to leave. If the politician wanted motorbike outriders they could dial for a couple of pizzas from different places and have the delivery guys ride in front of them.

This, of course, is not going to happen because politicians are obsessed with status – they are people who measure their own self-worth by the size of their limousine and the amount of deference they receive. The only ones who do not play this game, oddly enough, are the French.

France does not have a luxury car-maker, yet the political class, from the president down to local mayors, cannot ride around in anything that isn’t made domestically, so Peugeot and Citroën have always manufactured big cars that almost nobody else wants. My personal car is a Citroën C6 (above), which is the same vehicle President Sarkozy is driven around in. So specific is the design of this car that everything about the rear seating is skewed to make a tiny little man look imposing – the seats are raised and the window glass has a magnifying effect when viewed from the outside.

This is not to say that I do not suffer from a form of vehicular status anxiety which is connected with the automobile that takes me to or from work. But it is not about impressing and intimidating the public with my limousine, it is more to do with the fact that in the entertainment industry, the make and age of the vehicle that takes you to the studio or film set tells you a lot about how the producers feel about your work. Thirty years ago my first break in television was as part of a wild, live, late-night show called OTT, produced in Birmingham and fronted by Chris Tarrant. I had a very difficult relationship with Tarrant, who was also the producer, and the rest of the cast. I feel guilty now about my behaviour and I think I must have been a nightmare to work with. I saw myself as being on the cutting edge of the new comedy while the rest of the performers were old-style dinosaurs, and I thought that the show itself had a lot of stuff in it, strippers, lame sketches and naked men dancing about with balloons, that I thought would make me look bad.

Due to this tension I insisted on being driven back to London following the first live show that went out on a Saturday night. The car that took me home after that initial, seemingly successful transmission was a Jaguar XJ6. Then the newspaper reviews came out and later in the week, hundreds of outraged letters arrived from disgusted viewers, and the producers got to see the log of the thousand angry telephone calls. I was considered responsible for a fair amount of this furore with my foul-mouthed Marxist comedy and as a consequence, the vehicle waiting for me outside Central TV after the second week’s show was a Ford Transit van.

These days I am much easier to work with but still worry about how I’m perceived by the people who are employing me. I am writing this after completing my first day’s work as an actor on the long-running TV series New Tricks, in which I play a dodgy sports agent. In the early morning when I looked out the window, apart from worrying about whether I’d learnt my lines, I was obsessing over what car would be waiting to take me to the set. In the gloom I saw an ancient P-reg Chrysler Voyager at the kerb which made my heart sink, but what took me home was Dennis Waterman’s very own Jaguar, so during the day I must have done something right.